Two years ago this fall, Jose Vilson launched EduColor. It’s a website, it’s a hashtag, it’s an email newsletter, it’s a weekly chat, it’s a call for social justice. Most of all, as he and the other organizers say, it’s ‘a movement, not a moment.’

Many of us haven’t paid too much attention to EduColor. Maybe it’s because we’ve never heard of it (now you have). But maybe it’s because we don’t recognize the privilege that allows us to not feel any urgency to attend to the needs of our colleagues of color. Maybe it’s because we’re too focused on our own thing to worry about that other thing over there. Or, honestly, maybe it’s because talk about racial and other inequities makes us uncomfortable and we don’t know how to effectively participate and be of support.

It doesn’t take much effort to sign up for the twice-per-month EduColor newsletter and follow the #educolor hashtag. And, at a very minimum, we should do those two things. Not because of social justice hectoring or out of some sense of privileged guilt or because we think it makes us look good but because the resources that are being shared and the conversations that are being held are IMPORTANT. In a nation that soon will be ‘majority minority’ but definitely has a long way to go toward equity, all of us need to be more aware and more action-oriented regarding the concerns of our friends, neighbors, students, and educators of color. Yes, some of the things that we read may make us uncomfortable. But you know what? As Jose says, being uncomfortable needs to become our new comfortable. How are we going to meet the needs of all of our children if we can’t put uncomfortable topics on the table and discuss them? How are we going to remedy the ongoing racial disparities in resource allocation, school resegregation, negative media, disciplinary punishments, achievement gaps, instructional neglect, college and career readiness, digital equity, and many other educational areas if we’re not willing to face them head on with the awareness, humility, regret, and courage that they deserve?

The historical legacies of racism continue to linger large today and they manifest themselves on numerous ongoing fronts when it comes to schools, teachers, and students. EduColor is a good place to start thinking more deeply about these issues. You will meet some new people and, more importantly, you will probably learn something and might even be energized to take productive action. Head on over there and sign up. And send your colleagues and students there too. It will only take a moment. (and you might be inspired toward movement)

The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows – and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.

This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes – a medical emergency, divorce, job loss – the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”

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Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

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The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.